The Sacred Tree of Kum Bum

HP Blavatsky @ Theosophy Trust

Sacred Tree of Kum Bum

Thirty-seven years ago, two daring Lazarist Missionaries
who were attached to the Roman Catholic Mission establishment at Pekin,
undertook the desperate feat of penetrating as far as L'hassa, to preach
Christianity among the benighted Buddhists. Their names were Huc and Gabet;
the narrative of their journeys shows them to have been courageous and enthusiastic
to a fault. This most interesting volume of travel appeared at Paris more
than thirty years ago, and has since been translated twice into English
and, we believe, other languages as well. As to its general merits we are
not now concerned, but will confine our self to that portion  vol. ii, p.
84, of the American edition of 1852  where the author, M. Huc, describes
the wonderful "Tree of ten thousand Images" which they saw at
the Lamaserai, or Monastery, of Kum Bum, or Koun Boum, as they spell it.
M. Huc tells us that the Tibetan legend affirms that when the mother of
Tsong-Ka-pa, the renowned Buddhist reformer, devoted him to the religious
life, and, according to custom she "cut off his hair and threw it away,
a tree sprang up from it, which bore on every one of its leaves a Tibetan
character." In Hazlitt's translation (London, 1856) is a more literal
(though, still, not exact) rendering of the original, and from it  pp. 324-6  we
quote the following interesting particulars:

There were upon each
of the leaves well-formed Thibetan characters,
all of a green colour, some darker, some lighter than the leaf itself.
Our first impression was a suspicion of fraud on the part of the Lamas,
but, after a minute-examination of every detail, we could not discover
the least deception. The characters all appeared to us portions of the
leaf itself, equally with its veins and nerves; the position was not the
same in all; in one leaf they would be at the top of the leaf, in another
in the middle, in a third at the base, or at the side, the younger leaves
represented the characters only in a partial state of formation. The bark
of the tree and its branches, which resemble that of a plane-tree, are
also covered with these characters. When you remove a piece of old bark,
the young bark under it exhibits the individual outlines of characters
in a germinating state, and what is very singular, these new characters
are not unfrequently different from those which they replace.

The tree of the Ten thousand Images seemed to us of great age. Its trunk,
which three men could scarcely embrace with outstretched arms, is not more
than eight feet high; the branches, instead of shooting up, spread out
in the shape of a plume of feathers and are extremely bushy; few of them
are dead. The leaves are always green, and the wood, which is of a reddish
tint, has an exquisite odour something like cinnamon. The Lamas informed
us that in summer towards the eighth moon, the tree produces huge red flowers
of an extremely beautiful character.

The Abbé Huc himself puts the evidence with much more ardor. "These
letters," he says, "are of their kind, of such a perfection
that the type-foundries of Didot contain nothing to excel them."Let the reader mark this, as we shall have occasion to recur to it.
And he saw on  or rather in  the leaves, not merely letters but "religious
sentences," self-printed by nature in the chlorophyll, starchy cells,
and woody fibre! Leaves, twigs, branches, trunk  all bore the wonderful
writings on their surfaces, outer and inner, layer upon layer, and no two
superposed characters identical. "For do not fancy that these superposed
layers repeat the same printing. No, quite the contrary; for each lamina
you lift presents to view its distinct type. How, then, can you suspect
jugglery? I have done my best in that direction to discover the slightest
trace of human trick, and my baffled mind could not retain the slightest
suspicion." Who says this? A devoted Christian missionary,
who went to Tibet expressly to prove Buddhism false and his own creed true,
and who would have eagerly seized upon the smallest bit of evidence that
he could have paraded before the natives in support of his case. He saw
and describes other wonders in Tibet  which are carefully suppressed in
the American edition, but which by some of his rabidly orthodox critics
are ascribed to the devil. Readers of Isis Unveiled, will
find some of these wonders described and discussed, especially in the first
volume; where we have tried to show their reconciliation with natural law.

The subject of the Kum Bum tree has been brought back to our recollection
by a review, in Nature, vol. xxvii, p. 171, by Mr. A. H. Keane, of
Herr Kreitner's just published Report of the Expedition to Tibet under Count
Szechenyi, a Hungarian nobleman, in 1877-80. The party made an excursion
from Sining-fu to the monastery of Kum Bum "for the purpose of testing
Huc's extraordinary account of the famous tree of Buddha." They found
"neither image {of Buddha on the leaves}, nor letters, but a waggish
smile playing around the corner of the mouth of the elderly priest escorting
us. In answer to our enquiries he informed us that a long time ago, the
tree really produced leaves with Buddha's image, but that at present
the miracle was of rare occurrence. A few God-favoured men alone
were privileged to discover such leaves." That is quite enough for
this witness: a Buddhist priest, whose religion teaches that there are no
persons favoured by any God, that there is no such being as a God who dispenses
favours, and that every man reaps what he has sown, nothing less and nothing
more  made to say such nonsense: this shows what this explorer's testimony
is worth to his adored sceptical science! But it seems that even the waggishly-smiling
priest did tell them that good men can and do see the marvellous leaf-letters,
and so, in spite of himself, Herr Kreitner rather strengthens than weakens
the Abbé Huc's narrative. Had we never personally been able to verify
the truth of the story, we should have to admit that the probabilities favor
its acceptance, since the leaves of the Kum Bum tree have been carried by
pilgrims to every corner of the Chinese Empire (even Herr Kreitner admits
this), and if the thing were a cheat, it would have been exposed without
mercy by the Chinese opponents of Buddhism, whose name is Legion. Besides,
nature offers many corroborative analogies. Certain shells of the waters
of the Red Sea (?) are said to have imprinted upon them the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet; upon certain locusts are to be seen certain of the English
alphabet; and in the Theosophist, vol. ii, p. 91, an English
correspondent translates from Licht Mehr Licht an account by Sheffer,
of the strangely distinct marking of some German butterflies (Vanissa
Atalanta) with the numerals of the year 1881. Then again, the
cabinets of our modern Entomologists teem with specimens which show that
nature is continually producing among animals examples of the strangest
mimicry of vegetable growths  as, for instance, caterpillars which look
like tree-bark, mosses and dead twigs, insects that cannot be distinguished
from green leaves, &c. Even the stripes of the tiger are mimicries of
the stalks of the jungle grasses in which he makes his lair. All these separate
instances go to form a case of probable fact as to the Huc story of the
Kum Bum tree, since they show that it is quite possible for nature herself
without miracle to produce vegetable growths in the form of legible characters.
This is also the view of another correspondent of Nature, a
Mr. W. T. Thiselton Dyer, who, in the number of that solid periodical for
January 4th, after summing up the evidence, comes to the conclusion that
"there really was in Huc's time a tree with markings on the leaves,
which the imagination of the pious assimilated to Tibetan characters."
Pious what? He should remember that we have the testimony, not from some
pious and credulous Tibetan Buddhist, but from an avowed enemy of that faith,
M. Huc, who went to Kum Bum to show up the humbug, who did "his best
in that direction to discover the slightest trace of human trick" but
whose "baffled mind could not retain the slightest suspicion."
So until Herr Kreitner and Mr. Dyer can show the candid Abbé's motive
to lie to the disadvantage of his own religion, we must dismiss him from
the stand as an unimpeached and weighty witness. Yes, the letter-tree of
Tibet is a fact; and moreover, the inscriptions in its leaf-cells and fibres
are in the SENSAR, or sacred language used by the Adepts,
and in their totality comprise the whole Dharma of Buddhism and the history
of the world. As for any fanciful resemblance to actual alphabetical characters,
the confession of Huc that they are so beautifully perfect "that the
type foundries of Didot {a famous typographic establishment of Paris} contain
nothing to excel them," settles that question most completely. And
as for Kreitner's assertion that the tree is of the lilac species, Huc's
description of the colour and cinnamon-like fragrance of its wood, and shape
of its leaves, show it to be without probability. Perhaps that waggish old
monk knew common mesmerism and "biologized" Count Szechenyi's
party into seeing and not seeing whatever he pleased, as the late Prof.
Bushell made his Indian subjects imagine whatever he wished them to see.
Now and again one meets with such "wags."